In today’s agile world, development teams must respond quickly to ever changing business needs. The traditional practice is to use task management systems for the application code, to manage the business requirements. This article will show you how to implement those automation best practices for the database code as well.

Rob Gravelle updates the closest_restaurants procedure, from the MySQL: Calculating Distance Based on Latitude and Longitude tutorial, to utilize some of the new MySQL Geo-Spatial Functions, including ST_AsText(), Point(), ST_Distance_Sphere(), ST_Contains(), and ST_MakeEnvelope().

As the holiday season approaches, your organization can expect more BI activity as you take advantage of a significant increase in customer interactions. The smart IT organization should be proactive and prepare now for larger data volumes and more analytics activity by tuning their big data application for high performance.

The index property 'clustering factor' relies on the table data location, which is why rebuilding an index won't affect it. Read on to see what the clustering factor represents and how 'fixing' it for one index can make it worse for others created against the same table.